What happened to "led"?

The past tense of the verb "to lead" (as in, leading, as distinct from following) is "led". It's a perfectly good word. It's not like that abomination "read", which, in print, could mean the present tense (pronounced "reed") or the past tense (pronounded "redd"), wherein you have to figure out the tense from the context. No..."led" is a nice, clean, straightforward kind of word—simple, unambiguous, and unmistakable in its meaning.

So why is it that so many people insist on misspelling it as "lead"? Lead (pronounced "ledd") is a metal with the atomic symbol Pb. It has nothing to do with the verb "to lead". Are people so enamored of the confusion wrought by "read" that they have to proliferate it to a verb that has no such uncertainty in its spelling or pronunciation? Or are they just illiterate?

Oops...forgive me. The phrase "just illiterate" implies that illiteracy isn't a big problem in human communication. Of course, I know that's not true. I'll admit that syntactic noise (misspelling, incorrect punctuation, ...etc.) isn't as big a problem as the other two kinds of noise (semantic and pragmatic), but it's bad enough in its own right.

Anyhow, please support the word "led". It's not a heavy metal with atomic symbol Pb.